Here the Buck says stop it!

by Al Pastor

“The prototype good-field, no-hit shortstop,” Mickey Doolin of the early 20th Century Phillies.

It’s the kind of thing that used to find its way into my wallet. It fell from an old stack of receipts, slightly transparent from, I think, olive oil? Just the last paragraph, torn, clearly from The New Yorker with the byline, Reeves Wiedeman [“The Play,” 3/11/13]. The reverse side of the page has a funny comment from Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. Anyway, this time of year the comment from Bill Buckner bears repeating; actually, any time of year.

You have no chance,” Buckner went on. “I used to go to bed and I’d think about a pitch that I swung at and missed five games before. Two-thirds of the games you have probably aren’t gonna be very good, so you have to be able to go home, eat your dinner, play with your kids, be nice to your wife, and then come back to the ballpark the next day, ready to go. If you can’t do that, you better try something else.

I’ve certainly forgiven the modern era’s Fred Snodgrass. But I’m not from Boston. Don’t ask me about Mitch Williams.